Enemy Territory By Issue Guest Editor Daniel Tucker The enemy of my enemy is my friend.1 Turn the becomes more ameliorative, but for many proverb around a time or two and you might artists the possibility of using art to engage be able to locate yourself and your allies in the conflict is increasingly urgent. We hope that by confusing terrain of the present. sharing these examples we can all learn what crossing these lines can lead to, and to move The question of how to define an enemy as from healing to accountability. Furthermore, distinct from a friend has been a longstanding knowing this issue was coming out on the preoccupation of politics. Today, some eve of the 2020 elections in the U.S., in the conventions for deciphering alliances have midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, become complicated. For instance, you can’t and in conversation with a wave of uprisings look into someone’s eye or shake their hand against racial injustice, we felt it all the more while safely practicing physical distancing, important to include cultural practitioners and still others are intensified as the ability who may not all define themselves as socially to track a person’s positions through the engaged artists, but who encompass a wide convoluted archive that is the internet. Those range of collaborative creative practices that ideological signposts that render some as seek to confront facist tendencies and redress perpetrators of oppression and others sided the trauma of historical violence. with the angels have also experienced some surprising movements in the current climate Our historical reprint for this issue is Grupo de as fundamental concepts of health and safety Arte Callejero’s (GAC) writing from a decade encourage surprising alliances. In this moment, ago, just released last year for the first time masking has become an electoral issue and in English by Common Notions press. GAC the movement upsurges following the murders has been working together for over twenty of Black civilians by police have forced a years and has honed a practice of organizing reckoning with racist conceptions of justice communities to use street and protest art from every imaginable form of organization. to publicize and confront perpetrators of And turning the question on oneself to Argentina’s military dictatorship in their midst. examine complicity has become a worthy and dizzying preoccupation of the moment as Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger was interviewed sometimes the most urgent question can be by Prerana Reddy about his Settlement project, what if my friends’s enemy is me? designed to bring Indigenous artists from North America and the Pacific to reverse- In this issue of A Blade of Grass Magazine, occupy the town of Plymouth, U.K., where the we engaged an inspiring group of thinkers original Mayflower ship set sail 400-years-ago. and makers to consider what it looks like The wide-ranging interview covers Luger’s for various socially engaged art practices increasingly collective practice leading up to to venture into enemy territory. As Settlement and how the project had to pivot in socially-engaged art has become more the context of the pandemic. institutionalized, the risk has been that it 1. Variously attributed to 400 BC India to Kautilya or 19th century France to Gabriel Manigault Movement journalist Neesha Powell- The issue concludes with artist and organizer Twagirumukiza explores how communities Carol Zou performing as a modern-day Martin in Georgia, Ohio, and Florida have partnered Luther by drafting nine bold theses for debate with the Equal Justice Initiative’s engagement around reproductive labor inspired by the efforts to mark the sites where Black residents crisis of care and work that has infected our were lynched. The story is framed by the lives alongside the pandemic. recent chase and murder of Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes in the Georgia region where the When you find yourself in enemy territory, it author was born and raised, and the dramatic is best to have some friends. The contributors rise of movements celebrating Black life and who brought their generous engagement with opposing police brutality and white supremacy. this issue are unified in a symbolic framing that brings their complex experiences together. In Connecting to Powell-Twagirumukiza’s essay, this temporary association, there are ideas this issue’s guest editor Daniel Tucker shares for ways to confront white supremacy in its scenes from the last five-years of actions most violent and viral forms. They also give related to monuments commemorating the us models for how artists can take on state- Confederacy and police brutality. The piece sponsored disappearances at the neighborhood considers experiments such as Monument Lab, level and how to reverse-engineer settler Paper Monuments, Chicago Torture Justice colonial movements. They help us understand Memorials, and the “Haymarket 8-Hour Action that these fights are in psychic and symbolic Series” as ephemeral and process-based territories as much as physical ones, and that strategies for memorializing conflicts. “winning” is not always about defeating our enemies, but about generating more active Journalist and filmmaker Michael Premo’s accomplices. And yet, alliances can be tenuous interview with filmmaker Arthur Jones offers unless the work is done to consider what insight into a new film that follows the heels makes them cohere or contradict. It is our hope of cartoon character Pepe the Frog from that with this issue, reflected and refracting ambiguous slacker to a right-wing meme off one another, these words offer ideas for charged with hate on 4chan. Tracking the frog’s new and deeper forms of affinity. We need trajectory, we see what happens when the friendships worth fighting for. original illustrator, Matt Furie, has to confront his social responsibility and Jones shares what Acknowledgments it took to enter into the online depths of the alt-right. I’m lucky to join the A Blade of Grass team in making this project a reality: Vicki Capote, Amita Swadhin’s writing on her oral history Sabrina Chin, Deborah Fisher, Kathryn project Mirror Memoirs asks what happens McKinney, Karina Muranaga, and Prerana when the remedy is the enemy? Sharing the Reddy. It has been a pleasure working with stories of victims of childhood sexual violence the team and in particular the tireless work and their experiences of violence is further of the editorial team has made the thinking compounded within the very social work through this complex subject matter always and justice systems intended to assist them. stimulating. Cannupa Hanska Luger Without restorative justice practices designed The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances by survivors and an understanding that Thank you to Mia Henry, Lewis Wallace, Anna 2018-ongoing (Monster Slayer) perpetrators are often also victims of violence Simonton, Danielle Purifoy, AC Thompson, and Site-specific land acknowledgement, themselves, these legally rehabilitative Malav Kanuga for their help lining up content Taos, NM. Photo by Dylan McLaughlin programs do more harm than good. for this issue. Regalia: beadwork, surplus industrial felt, ceramic, riot gear, afghan Contributors GRUPO DE ARTE CALLEJERO (GAC) is inaugural Burke Prize. See more from the artist and a NYSCA Individual Artist Award. Michael DANIEL TUCKER works as an artist, currently made up of Lorena Bossi, Carolina at www.cannupahanska.com and on instagram at is on the Board of Trustees of A Blade of Grass. writer, educator, and organizer developing Golder, Mariana Corral, Vanesa Bossi and @cannupahanska. documentaries, publications, classes, exhibitions Fernanda Carrizo, who all live and work in PRERANA REDDY is Director of Programs and events inspired by his interest in social Buenos Aires. The group was formed in 1997 ARTHUR JONES has art directed animation and at A Blade of Grass. Previously she was the movements and the people and places from in Buenos Aires, by a small group of Fine Arts motion graphics for journalists and documentary Director of Public Programs & Community which they emerge. His writings and lectures students. Their first interventions ranged from filmmakers at news outlets like the New York Engagement for the Queens Museum in New on the intersections of art and politics and his mural-graffiti to actions on advertising posters. Times, Vice, the Center for Investigative York City from 2005–2018, where she organized collaborative art projects have been published In 1998, they began participating in the escraches Reporting, and the International Consortium of both exhibition-related and community-based and presented widely and are documented on of the group H.I.J.O.S., creating a type of public Journalists. Feels Good Man is his directorial programs as well as public art commissions. the archive miscprojects.com. He is currently complaint signage in the form of mock street debut. In addition, she oversaw a cultural organizing curator-in-residence at Mural Arts Philadelphia signs. In 1999, they won a sculpture competition initiative for Corona, Queens residents and in 2019, he completed a nine city tour of for the city’s Remembrance Park with their work NEESHA POWELL-TWAGIRUMUKIZA that resulted in the creation and ongoing the curatorial project Organize Your Own: The Posters of Memory, which remains in the park is a Southern storyteller who conspires in the programming of a public plaza and a popular Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination today. The formats chosen for their interventions name of liberated Black futures, queer and education center for new immigrants. She is Movements. He works as an Assistant Professor include installation, graphics, performance and transgender Black/Indigenous/people of color currently on the NYC Department of Cultural and Graduate Program Director in Socially- video. They have worked collaboratively with power, solidarity economics, transformative Affairs Advisory Commission and sits on the Engaged Art at Moore College of Art & Design.